Charlie Huston - Every Last Drop

Luxurious in the manner of a Gilded Age private club for rail barons, the Home kept the busted rich in a manner to which they had become accustomed.

Good old Andrew Freedman, looking out for the little people.

Whatever, it was his money. Man should spend it how he wants. Especially after he's dead. Besides, whatever Andy's wishes may have been at one time, the place ended up a broken-down community center for run-of-the-mill poor

old folks.

Proving again that time gives fuck all about who you are or what you want.

I manage to glean this knowledge from a plaque as Predo leads me from the subsiding ballroom on the third floor through several corridors artfully decorated with sagging plaster and rat droppings. -Dregs.

He points ahead and one of the enforcers flanking us moves to a door and opens it. -That's what she's collecting.

We pass through the door into an echoing stairwell, climbing. -Rogues. Off-1 slanders. The dross clinging to the fringes of the Clans. All those who lack the wherewithal and fortitude to understand that the Vyrus has made us different.

He pauses on a landing, waits as I negotiate around some broken glass with my bare, mangled foot. -That there is no going back.

He starts up the next half flight. -Traditionally, that kind of offal weeds itself from the community. Viewed as

an engine of evolution, the Vyrus is a most powerful instrument for defining the fittest of the species. One can argue at length as to whether we are human any longer. Coalition precepts hold that we are. Regardless, the Vyrus insists on extreme levels of fitness, resilience, adaptability. Without those qualities, the runts die out quite rapidly. Our primary concern is not how best to steel them to this life, to aid in their adaptation, but how to make their deaths as rapid and as invisible as possible.

He stops at the top of the stairs, waiting while one of the enforcers opens the door and sweeps the area beyond with the barrel of his weapon.

I point at him. -He making sure no sleeping pigeons are waiting to get the drop on us?

Predo waits for a nod from the enforcer and goes through the door ahead of me.

— Our intelligence on the Bronx is far from extensive. But we have heard about the Mungiki.

I step out onto the roof, a river breeze in the tops of the high trees that grow from the grounds below, a few hazy stars above. -Mungiki are in Queens.

He stops next to one of the half-dozen TV aerials that sprout from the roof.

— We heard some were still left.

— I hear they're all out. Whole crazy pack of them in Queens.

— Is that what the drums tell you, Pitt?

— No, that's what being exiled up here for a year tells me.

He studies a spray-painted tag on the back of a cement urn decorating the edge of the roof. -A year.

He looks at me. -A year in the Bronx.

He looks me up and down. -And, until the last few hours, very little worse for wear.

He resumes his walk, skirting a sag in the tar paper where rainwater has pooled in the shade of one of the trees, greened with scum. -But you have always shown the resilience I was speaking of. I doubted it for some time, thought your sentimentality would get the best of you. Labeled you overly reckless. But I was wrong. Your natural ruthlessness serves you well. A particularly useful adaptation for this neighborhood, I imagine.

I think about what I learned growing up in the Bronx, who taught me the

nature of ruthlessness. I wonder if Predo knows this is home turf for me. Wonder if it matters what he knows.

He looks back at me. -No comment?

He's right, no comment.

He shrugs, stops at the southwest corner of the building where the tops of the trees part, the sky opens up and the view carries straight to the lights and towers across the river. -Perhaps you have some comment regarding that.

I look at the City, but I still have nothing to say.

He lays a hand on the snapped base of another of those urns. -We do not want her killed, Pitt.

He looks at me.

— The wreckage that now floats around her would become un-moored, drift into the open. She has established herself, in her hubris, in the midst of our turf. An entire apartment building in the near center of Coalition territory. She's housing them, providing for their needs. A welfare state. Were she to die, that flotsam would bob into our streets. We could not contain them all. A strike of any scale on the building would draw far too much attention. Our influence spreads to

certain circles in the uninfected community, but not so broadly that we can conceal a paramilitary raid in the heart of the Upper East Side. No.

His hand wraps the jagged stump of cement.

— As appealing as assassination may be, it is out of the question. We must rather proceed with greatest discretion. We know her ultimate goal.

He looks upward. -A cure.

Shaking his head.

— But we need to know by what organizing principles she will proceed. If she is pledged to secrecy, working on her own under the auspices of her fathers biotech labs and with no outside research partners, we have some amount of time and leeway in our plans. If she intends to make this a public effort, marshaling evidence that the Vyrus is some form of illness, and then launching a public-health campaign via a grandstanding news conference or similar stunt, we shall have to act posthaste.

I grunt.

He looks at me. -Yes?

I'm still looking at the City, the Empire State Buildings spire lit up in red,

white and blue.

— Nothing. I just like to make a mental note when people use words I've only

read in books before. Posthaste.

— Well, in an effort to broaden your vocabulary, allow me to use another word:

genocide.

— Yeah, I heard that one before.

— Good. Then I do not need to define it for you. You can picture it on your

own. How it will proceed if she tries to launch an effort to cure the Vyrus as if it

were African famine relief or a similar faddish cause for dissipated fashion

models and rock stars to champion.

I step closer to the balustrade, eyes on the lights. -Maybe wed get our own concert.

— The best we might hope for, Pitt, would be an orchestra of our own imprisoned kind to serenade us as we filed into the showers. -Yeah, well I'm not arguing the point.

— No. Nor would I expect you to. Occasional lapses into romanticism aside, you have always been clear on what fate waits us if we are revealed.

I give him a look.

— Wonder.

— Yes?

— What's Bird think of all this? The Society? Rest of the Clans?

He folds his arms.

— Tensions, unsurprisingly, are high. Your former employer, Bird, still feels that our long-term best interests can only be served when we all unite and present ourselves en masse to the public eye. He does, however, allow that the moment is not yet ripe. That the girls efforts are destabilizing. The Hood, while still maintaining a war stance on our northern border, have taken a similar position. D.J. Grave Digga will not pursue hostilities while this matter is unresolved.

I measure my heartbeat, let five slow beats count off before I go further, knowing Predo will fish out my interest if it is not guarded. -I'd think the idea of a cure would send Enclave over the edge.

He pulls his arms tighter around himself.

— Daniel would have had some opinion on the matter. Insane as he was, he would have had a measured response. The idea of a cure for the Vyrus might well have been a heresy to him, but Daniel would never have considered that it was an actual possibility. I expect he would have bided, as he did in most all

Clan matters. But.

I count more heartbeats. -But?

He unfolds his arms.

— But Daniel is dead. And there is a new head of Enclave. And he has declared that Enclave no longer communicate with heretics.